Would you say it’s a triangle? Or would you say it’s a group of squares? Clearly it’s both. There’s no right or wrong answer. To infer the scope of people’s attention, we ask them to pick out a similar arrangement of shapes. Do they see this arrangement as more similar to a triangle made up of smaller triangles, or to a square made up of smaller squares. In conducting experiments with images like these, I’ve discovered that whether people see the big picture— the triangle in this case— depends on their current emotional state.4 When we inject people with positivity, their outlook expands. They
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